John E. Tullidge

John Elliott Tullidge was born in Weymouth, England in 1838. He was a landscape painter of the Rocky Mountain School, ornamental painter, and mural painter. He died in Salt Lake City in 1899.

Because Tullidge displayed artistic talent early, he was apprenticed to an English decorative painter. He converted to The Church of Jesus Christ and immigrated to Utah in 1863. Along with George Ottinger, and Dan Weggeland, Tullidge helped found the short-lived Deseret Academy of Fine Arts in 1863.

By the late 1860s Tullidge had gained a good reputation as an ornamental painter. He also painted murals for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Salt Lake City Temple. Minnie Lake(1890) is featured in the Springville Museum of Art permanent collection.

Tullidge, John Elliott (1836-1899), A native of Weymouth, England, was a pioneer Utah painter whose work attracted an important Denver patron as well as a members of the powerful Walker family in Salt Lake City. Even though he had only a brief apprenticeship in his teens with an English decorative painter (a factor preventing further homeland "formal art study except for meager training at Milready"), Tullidge was able to develop into a landscape painter in America, using a calm but nicely brushy luminism in his works not unlike effects seen in the pictures of some secondary figures associated with this country's Hudson River School. Then, like Dan Weggeland (q.v.), he eventually capped his studio career by painting in various LDS temples (St. George, Logan, and Manti). Edward W. Tullidge, a brother of John Tullidge, was the most prominent nineteenth-century writer on Utah art and one of several leaders of the Godbeite movement in dissent from Mormonism beginning in the 1860s. (b. April 17)

Falk, Peter Hastings. Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999.

Falk, Peter Hastings. Who Was Who in American Art : Compiled from the Original Thirty-four Volumes of American Art Annual--Who's Who in Art, Biographies of American Artists Active from 1898-1947. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985.